Sunset
by Angharad23
Summary: This little ficlet is about Beru. Her perceptions of Anakin and Padme and how they change her life.


Disclaimer: Star Wars and its characters and situations are the legal and intellectual property of George Lucas, Lucasfilm LTD, 20th Century Fox, et al.  No profit is being made from this story.

_Authors Note: One thing that struck me when I saw AOTC was Beru, an interesting contrast to Padme. Beru was the one who seemed to understand Luke better than Owen, and I became interested in what the story was behind this lonely looking, kind girl who was so outshone by Padme's looks and exotic costumes. _

**Sunset**

Within one week Beru's life had irrevocably changed. Legends and fairy tales had come flying straight out of the sky, it seemed. The two strangers who had come among them were as alien beings to those around her, but secretly Beru watched them with something akin to worship.

Could they be ordinary humans, these mysterious cloaked beings? Owen said he'd always figured Anakin, the other son, would show up one day. Shmi didn't mention him often--in fact, hardly at all. It was Beru who had gained most of her confidence, as Klieg didn't like to about things he didn't fully understand. He was a kind man, Klieg, who if he didn't fully understand his wife at least appreciated and truly loved her.

There wasn't much to do, or think about, on Tatooine except pure survival. Of Beru's five older brothers, four were steady, hard working youths concerned only with moisture vaporators and the interior of engines. Her father was the same. It was Mother who had somehow managed to create some beauty and order in Beru's hard, dusty existence. Mother had once been beautiful, and retained that beauty later only in her eyes and warm smile. She would sit with her daughter at night outside, braiding her hair in intricate patterns and tell her stories she had learned from her grandmother. Stories about other times, other planets, all the exotic inhabitants of the galaxy she had never seen. Her expansion of spirit had only passed to her daughter and one son, the oldest, Adan.

He had left home at fifteen, a year after their mother died, and had never been heard from again. Beru had worshipped her eldest brother. On the rare occasions she was alone with him he would talk to her about spaceships and other planets, and his dreams of becoming a pilot. When her mother was alive she had talked about sending Adan off to flight training, but then came her terrible illness and with her died any plans for Adan's dreams. He began to haunt the spaceport of Mos Eisley, staying away from home days at a time.

And one morning he left and didn't come back, without a note, without a single goodbye Her father had spoken angrily at his departure and declared him evicted from the family, but his eyes were haunted. He began to sit in his chair by the window at night, just looking. Waiting. The rest of the family gave Adan up for dead, but Beru liked to think of her older brother flying through the stars, free at last.

Excitement had erupted when Klieg Lars returned from Mos Eisley with a wife--a former slave, it was whispered at first, later openly discussed. But not for long. Shmi was hard working, but extraordinarily kind and compassionate. The farmer's were a suspicious, tight knit group, but Shmi became beloved by all quickly. When the terrible attack of the sandpeople came, every farmer in the area went out on an organized search party to find her. They mourned her loss as one of their own family had died.

Beru was sent to the Lars farm to help Shmi adjust and settle down, and because her father felt she should have a woman to guide her now that Mother was gone. And there she met Owen. Owen was a gentle, mild mannered and kind boy whom Beru had seen occasionally but not really met. He made her feel safe and warm and protected--a feeling rapidly disappearing from her home life. The nights she spent at her old home she climbed out onto the roof to stare deeply into the stars, wondering if she would ever leave this desert, this planet, this life to join the billions of other beings who lived among those shining objects.

Beru found out about Anakin one night about a month after Shmi's arrival when she found the older woman outside crying at the stars. And that was when she discovered that Shmi Lars, nee Skywalker, had a son who was being trained as a Jedi Knight.

Jedi.

It was a holy word, here. One whispered in awe or terror or anger, depending on the species. Beru's mother's grandmother had reportedly once seen one in Mos Eisley when she was a girl. Adan, who spent all his time with spacers and pilots, once told her about them. They had magical powers, he said, looking off into space, real magic. They carried swords made of light and couldn't be killed. They spent their lives protecting the innocent and freeing the downtrodden and enslaved.

Once, only once, did Shmi tell the whole story of how Anakin was taken away. Apparently a real Jedi Master had come to stay with her during a sandstorm. Shmi had laughed at the telling of it.

"Anakin walked in the door, shouting that he was home," she recounted ruefully. "And when I came to the door, there was the strangest group of people I had ever seen. Anakin only introduced them with a simple 'These are my friends, Mom,' as if they were a group of ten year olds."

Among them was the queen of Naboo in disguise--Padme had confided this information to Shmi before they had left--and Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn, whom Shmi had never forgotten. Tall, powerful, and gentle in manner, as she described him. Humble on the outside, but so obviously hiding an alertness and intelligence and pure power like she had never seen. He was the man to whom she had entrusted her baby, who had taken her son to a better, greater life.

And here had come a Jedi out of the sky, sitting in the next room. Beru had known it the moment the tall, cloaked figure came into view, before Owen had made the introductions and delivered the bad news. Even more extraordinary was the girl by his side. Almost the opposite of the giant next to her, Padme was small, dark haired, and refined. Beru had never seen such fabric in her life as what she wore. This girl's eyes, too, were deep and aware. They missed nothing.

All those nights spent outside, staring at the bright desert stars, thinking of what beings loved and moved and fought within them had become real now. Somehow, those dreams had made themselves flesh and materialized.

Materialized, Beru found later, in the form of the most powerful Jedi ever known, and a twenty four year old woman who became the Queen of an entire planet at age fourteen, and now carried the weight of hundreds more on her shoulders.

Materialized later in the lone, dusty figure of a man with such an inner power as she had not yet seen, carrying a baby in his arms to give to her to protect from his father, the passionate loyal youth who had become something so evil Obi-Wan would never speak of it. And this figure, this one Jedi Knight who had killed a Sith when only an apprentice, one of the only Jedi who had survived the great Scourge, became a secluded hermit known only by the name of Old Ben.

The grey eyed child grew up under her loving care and Owen's watchful eye, never knowing that the blood of a Jedi and a Queen flowed through his veins. That his twin sister was being raised as a princess of Alderaan. And that the man at the top of the Emperor's extermination list waited for his potential to bloom.

And over it all, she remembered Shmi's eyes as she had last seen them, weeping with heartbreak over her lost son, but with the ever present faith in the greatness of the destiny that lay before him, and the entire galaxy.


End file.
